Class in some countries is about the past; you can be a shabby aristocrat if your grandfather was the Earl of Whatevershire. In American policy discussions, class is often implicitly about the present — where you lie in the income and wealth distributions this year. But on some level, everyone knows that class in America is really about the future.
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In an inheritocracy, it's a defeatist narrative in which basically your your opportunities don't come from what you learn or what you earn, but whether you have access to the bank of mom and dad and eventually inheritance.
The Prof G Pod
The fact that healthcare is 18% of GDP and people are embarrassed by that, what it tells me is that we have a priority problem in this country, not a spending problem. If we could actually deliver value in healthcare, I'd want it to be 50% of GDP. I want the majority of our most talented people working on the most important problems, which is extending the quality and length of human life.
Zach Reitano — Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
I actually do think it's deceitful. So again, I'm thinking about a friend that I made who was outside of journalism. And we would complain together all the time, we were in our mid-twenties, about how expensive this city is. And actually, she was living in an apartment that was even less pleasant than mine was in a kind of a big room share situation in Bushwick. It was a pretty nasty apartment, honestly. And so when we were complaining about how bad things were, I did have this feeling that we were kind of in the same boat.
Mona Chalabi — Fresh Air